NEW YORK, NY – The Hoverbike is here and Mayor Bloomberg of New York has ordered 100,000 for the NYPD!

NEW YORK, NY – The Hoverbike is here and Mayor Bloomberg of New York has ordered 100,000 for the NYPD!

Mayor Bloomberg is ecstatic. He has a new way to catch criminals in Manhattan. The Hoverbike.

The Hoverbike takes “catching air” to a whole new level. With a 1170 cc 4-stroke engine delivering 80 kW driving two ducted propellers, the inventor of the Hoverbike, Chris Malloy, says with its high thrust to weight ratio, the Hoverbike reaches an estimated height of more than 15,000 feet and reach an airspeed of 173 mph.

Mayor Bloomberg was impressed and saw the potential for use as Emergency Response Vehicles. “We are going to hire 1,000 Hoverbike Officers immediately,” Bloomberg said at a press conference. “This will dramatically change how New York City responds to 911 calls.”

Malloy works in the mechanical design of airborne and ground based hyperspectral sensors at an optical engineering company in Australia. It took him two and a half years slaving away in his garage to develop the Hoverbike. His efforts were prompted when his helicopter instructor likened a Robinson R22 light utility helicopter to an airborne motorbike.

The Hoverbike seats a single pilot on a Kevlar reinforced carbon fiber with foam core frame in between two horizontal spinning propellers constructed from Tasmanian Oak with a carbon fiber leading edge. Instead of the complicated swash plate setup found in single rotor helicopters, the Hoverbike employs the same basic flying principles as a tandem-rotor Chinook helicopter.

Control of the Hoverbike is done completely via the handlebars. Forward and reverse movement is controlled via the motorbike-like handlebar grips. The right grip increases the thrust, while the left grip controls the angle of the control vanes positioned under the rotors to pitch the nose of the Hoverbike down – for forward movement – or up – for moving backwards. Meanwhile, turning is achieved by turning the handlebars left and right, just like a motorbike but with an extra axis that lets them rotate up and down a little, which alters the angle of the front and rear control vanes.

Riders will wear a parachute.

With dimensions of 9.8 x 4.3 x 1.8 f, the Hoverbike weighs 231 lb and has a maximum takeoff weight of 595 lb. The bike’s 30 L primary fuel tank should provide a range of 200 miles at a cruising speed of 100 mph, while the addition of secondary fuel tanks that double the fuel capacity will double the range.

The Hoverbike is now in full production and other cities – Dallas, Miami, Washington DC and Memphis have all put in similar orders to New York. Malloy hopes to produce 50,000 Hoverbikes a month to meet the demand.

Here’s the next generation of Hoverbike Malloy is working on:

We’ll bring you video of the flight tests once Chris has completed them. Until then we’ll have to make do with the short video below on an airflow visualization smoke test.